


Double Dutch

by j_s_cavalcante



Category: due South
Genre: Character Study, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-01
Updated: 2010-02-01
Packaged: 2017-10-06 22:30:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/58415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/j_s_cavalcante/pseuds/j_s_cavalcante
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>Strawberry shortcake, cream on top,<br/>Tell me the name of your sweetheart.<em></em></em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Double Dutch

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spuffyduds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spuffyduds/gifts).



Some girls in the projects are playing a game of Double Dutch. They pay absolutely no attention to Ray and Fraser, though Fraser is certain they have seen them. It is rather difficult to avoid seeing the Red Serge, after all, and the statistical likelihood of nine teenage girls, most of them unrelated, being red-green colorblind is vanishingly small. Virtually impossible, Fraser decides.

 

Or at the least, freakishly improbable, as Ray might say.

 

Sure enough, one of the rope turners blinks very slowly as he watches, and he sees the glint of the tear layer on her sclera behind thick, curly lashes.

 

He focuses on her white sneakers. She’s like Ray, he thinks, with long, skinny feet. She’s unlike Ray in almost every other way: female, tiny, dark, and barely fourteen, Fraser guesses, while Ray is tall and blond and in his late thirties. And male. Very.

 

But the young girl is beautiful, and in that way they’re alike, he thinks.

 

And realizes how inappropriate such thoughts are at the moment. They’re on the trail of a killer, and they need the help of the local citizenry, even those members who are barely fourteen and playing Double Dutch as though it’s the only important thing in the world.

 

Fraser calculates how close he and Ray might be able to get to the spinning ropes without breaking the girls’ concentration. 

 

Beside him, Ray is apparently calculating something quite different: how loud he needs to pitch his voice to be heard over the sounds of the girls’ chanting and the rhythmic slap of the ropes on the  pavement.

 

Ray rubs the back of his head with an impatient hand, inadvertently pushing the back into short, unruly spikes to match the longer ones on top.

 

“Hey!” Ray says again, louder than the last four times, but the girls are still pretending not to notice.

 

Ray blows out a breath and strides forward, and Fraser’s just about to call him back sharply when he steps right up to the edge of the ropes, almost close enough for the ropes to hit his nose as he leans forward, and then…

 

…and then Ray’s in, having timed his jump expertly, in the middle of the whirling Double Dutch ropes and jumping with the girls, perfectly, exactly in rhythm with them, his feet quick and light on the pavement, and he’s chanting along with them, using nonsense syllables in place of whatever the girls are saying; it’s a nonsense rhyme in any case, and Fraser can’t make out all the words, but it is clear they’re not important and the rhythm _is._ 

 

And Ray’s got it; Ray’s right in rhythm with them.

 

The girls turn the rope faster and faster and Ray keeps up, apparently without difficulty.

 

Fraser has already doffed his hat; he did so when they got within speaking distance of the young girls. Disconcerted, he realizes he is clutching it hard enough to leave marks in the wool felt. He catches his breath and attempts to relax.

 

Two girls are jumping in the double arcs of the ropes with Ray, twisting and turning and jumping about-face and then back, while Ray stays in the middle, the only part of the arch tall enough to accommodate him, and speeds up exactly as the ropes do, lost in the rhythm. Ray knows this dance.

 

Fraser can’t think where he might have learned it; Ray boxes, but boxers jump rope quite differently.

 

He can only think that Ray has learned the steps of this dance here, here in the projects of Chicago, and he wonders. He’s always assumed Ray grew up in one of the white immigrant neighborhoods, perhaps moved to a suburb later--he has mentioned a house--but Ray has never said exactly. The house on North Octavia’s good enough, was all he’d said, because I’m Vecchio, he’d said.

 

Eventually the girls’ arms tire, the ropes slow, and the small girl who’d blinked slowly at Fraser looks up at Ray. Ray has stepped nimbly out of the ropes just before they slap the pavement for the last time and lie still. The small girl hands her rope off to someone else; the other girls switch places, the jumpers standing back to watch, the other turner and two of the watchers taking up positions at mid-rope, preparing to jump.

 

The small girl is shaking out her arms and coming just close enough to say quietly to Ray, “So you’re that cop? About Wednesday?”

 

Ray nods. “Yeah.”

 

“We didn’t see nothing,” she says, and it’s rote, it’s rehearsed, it’s not true in the slightest.

 

“Yeah, I know,” Ray says, and his voice doesn’t drop down at the end of the sentence as though it’s the end of anything. He waits a minute, then says under his breath, “You want to tell us about it?”

 

She glances over at Fraser, and he sees her eyes widen to take in all the red. He must pass muster, because she simply nods and looks back at Ray. “Okay,” she says. “Marcus,” she says. “Willoughby,” she adds, so quietly that he and Ray are the only ones who hear. “He put it down the gutter next to the school.”

 

Ray glances at Fraser, nods once. It’s as they suspected.

 

He looks back at the girl. “So you got nothing to tell us?” he says, much more loudly.

 

“Yeah. Sorry,” she says.

 

“Gotcha. Thanks anyway, kid.” He hunches his shoulders and turns away, his body language telegraphing disappointment. Anyone watching will conclude he’s been turned away empty.

 

She shrugs and turns back to her friends. Two different girls have picked up the ropes and they’re whirling again.

 

Fraser hears the chanting begin anew, the ropes whipping the pavement.

 

He has turned away with Ray, though, and they’re walking together, and all he can focus on is Ray’s narrow feet, graceful in his motorcycle boots.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Ficlet for More Joy Day 2010, written to Spuffyduds' request: RayK jumping rope!


End file.
